Given recent reports on CGI Federal's history of performance on government website projects, CMS appears to be lucky that the CGI Federal contract was due up for renewal in February giving CMS a simple way to remove CGI from the HealthCare.gov project. That doesn't make it easier for CMS or for the contractors still on the project. Now a new team moves in to pick up the pieces. CGI Federal, meanwhile, will certainly be paying more attention to getting the job done right on the rest of the projects it still has at CMS.

I dunno. Seems there's a pattern here regardless of who got the contract to provision the enroll site; federal or state. With the finger p;ointing it isn't odd that Accenture would get the contract given it is a major business partner and reseller for IBM wares.

Further, there should be a common template for this type of service and delivery. It would make adoption much simpler, downstream setup and admin faster and cheaper as the economies roll in,

On your point about common templates: You have to remember that these insurance exchanges vary state to state because the insurance laws, health providers, and a host of other data variables also vary by state. You can blame the Obama administration and health officials for not foreseeing that three dozen states would dump the work of building exchanges on the door step of the feds. And while its fair to suppose there must be a number of common compoenents in these excchanges, setting them up and configuring them correctly for each state, and making sure all the connections work is a massive project management undertaking.

@WKash ... If you write a flow chart there is nothing much different about the exchanges. Selectors would be comparable and really are just swaps of PII strings with feeds to backend registration database templates with reason checking. I agree it's huge, and part of the problem is port access and uptime. But as we say in Canada, the problem is the same, but different between states, and the fed.

So the Feds have chosen to hire the company the sued itself to fix the Obamacare Quagmire?

I hope the Feds fare better than my previous employer which spent $14 million on hardware, software and consulting services only to receieve a long distance billing system which was vastly inferior to the homegrown system written by several good ole boys from South Alabama. After $14 million and 18 months of Accenture's blunders my employer was forced to file for bankruptcy and shutter a $75 million business. I suppose that things could have changed over time, but I doubt that they've changed that much, but I suppose that that the cost of any blunders can always be passed on to the U.S. taxpayors.

Your company was doomed from the get-go if it was relying solely on the performance of a consulting firm. What about your companies job to manage the consultant work? Were there no content and performance reviews? Any company who blames their demise solely on the IT consulting services they received will be laughed at by everyone in the IT industry...

Experience across both the states and federal government shows the health care sites are tough to get up and running properly. Blaming only a high profile sub, but not the prime, contractor, as the Minnesota governor did, is scapegoating. You'd almost think a company is foolish for taking on the job, except for those large payouts involved. Good project management would at least keep tabs on progress and be able to single out those subcontracters who aren't meeting their responsibilties. But that too seems to be in short supply.